perjantai 30. tammikuuta 2015

The National Interest: Ukraine Exposed: Kiev's Authoritarianism





Ukraine Exposed: Kiev's Authoritarianism

Can the West continue to ignore the Kiev government's disturbing behavior? Part 1.

James Carden

January 30, 2015


Even before the torchlight march on January 1, however, there were signs some establishment figures were becoming alive to the danger these far-right nationalists pose to Ukraine, and perhaps to European security. On December 30, in the Washington Post, former Freedom House President and current Atlantic Council Sr. Fellow Adrian Karatnycky warned that several of the far-right battalions, like the Azov and Dnepr-1, who had seen action in eastern Ukraine are “revealing a dark side. In recent months, they have threatened and kidnapped government officials” and “boasted that they will take power if Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko fails to defeat Russia.”

These, according to Karatnycky, are no mere idle threats because Ukraine’s interior minister, Arsen Avakov, has only encouraged these elements, noting that “...in September he even named a leader of the neo-Nazi Azov brigade to head the police in the Kiev region.” He urges the West to take notice and Ukrainian leaders like Yatsenyuk not to “sweep this emerging threat under the rug.”


Let’s hope there is a limit to what the US will countenance and that the glorification and/or imitation of Nazi collaborators is it.

James Carden is a Contributing Editor for The National Interest.

Image: Wikimedia Commons/UP9/CC by-sa 3.0

Can the West continue to ignore the Kiev government's disturbing behavior? Part 2.

James Carden

January 30, 2015


From the very start of the Ukraine crisis, Washington’s neoconservative lobby has sought to downplay the less appealing aspects of the government that came to power in Kiev in February. In May, a conventicle of Western intellectuals took place in Kiev under the auspices of the New Republic. They attended a five-day conference called “Ukraine: Thinking Together.” There Leon Wieseltier, then literary editor of TNR, channeled his inner Miniver Cheevy to state that one motive for convening the conference was his “somewhat facile but nonetheless sincere regret at having been born too late to participate in the struggle of Western intellectuals...against the Stalinist assault on democracy in Europe.”

One of the conference’s co-organizers, Yale historian Timothy Snyder, declaredthat “Ukraine is the European present. We have now reached a point where Ukrainian history and European history are very much the same thing, for good or for evil.”


But examples of the new authoritarianism gripping Kiev have become tougher to miss in recent months, so much so that there are signs that perhaps even the Washington establishment is begin to feel some discomfiture at the actions of its new Ukrainian clients. In September, Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty reported that the Ukrainian Defense Ministry was creating a “Special Service” to, among other things, “get rid of the Russian 5th column in the Ukrainian armed forces.” The Ukrainian defense minister, Valeriy Heletry, said the new service would be based on the Stalin-era SMERSH; it would “expose and dispose of enemy agents.” By some estimates, SMERSH, the Russian-language acronym for “Special Methods of Detecting Spies” sent upwards of 600,000 former Soviet POWs to the Gulag after the war.

In October, Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko signed a decree establishing October 14 as an official “Day of Ukrainian Defenders” to commemorate the anniversary of the founding of the wartime UPA, theUkrains’ka Povstans’ka Armiia or Ukrainian Insurrectionist Army. As the historian Halik Kochanski has noted, the UPA worked hand in hand with Poland’s Nazi occupiers, killing, to take but one example, nearly 10,000 Poles over the night of July 11-12, 1943. “A feature of the UPA action,” according to Kochanski, “was its sheer barbarity. They were not content merely to shoot their victims but often tortured them first or desecrated their bodies afterwards.” All of this is well known, yet Poroshenko still took to Twitter to declare: “UPA soldiers—an example of heroism and patriotism to Ukraine.”

In January, according to Agence France Presse, thousands of Ukrainian nationalists took part in a torchlight procession marking the 106th birthday of Ukrainian nationalist Stepan Bandera. According to AFP, some of the marchers “wore second world war-era army uniforms while others draped themselves in the red and black nationalist flags and chanted ‘Ukraine belongs to Ukrainians!’” Anyone under the impression that torchlight processions through the streets of European capitals are a thing of the past would be sorely mistaken.

This spectacle was followed in short order by Ukrainian prime minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk’s assertion—made, almost unbelievably, on German airwaves on January 7 that “All of us still clearly remember the Soviet invasion of Ukraine and Germany. That has to be avoided. And nobodyhas the right to rewrite the results of the Second World War.” Don’t let anyone tell you Russia has a monopoly on “disinformation.

sunnuntai 25. tammikuuta 2015

EP. Mitä Puutin itsestään oikein luulee?


Juttelin tässä suomalaisten tuttavien kanssa, ja keskustelu alkoi kuten tavallisesti, "no, mitähän se Puutin luulee olevansa?"

Mitähän? Hän varmasti luulee olevansa maailman suurimman maan johtaja, jolla on hirveästi huolia sekä maan taloudesta että turvallisuudesta. Näin lyhyesti.

Hän ei varmasti ajattele gay-yhteisön mainos-, valistus- tai kulkueongelmia, ei Navalnyin rahaongelmia eikä enää Bulgarian kansantaloutta. Hän, kyllä, varmasti ajattelee Donbassin ihmisiä, jotka kuolee, haavoittuu ja kärsii Ukrainan armeijan raskaan tykistön tulituksissa.

Typeriä kysymyksiä.

Pietarin-kaupungin kokoisen maan kokeneet demokraattiset hallitsijat eivät saa mitään järkevää aikaan omaan kriisiin Suomessa, katsovat vain, kuin hieno hyvinvointivaltio hajoaa Euroopan käsiin, ja kysyvät, mitähän se Puutin oikein itsestään luulee? Ei hän luule mitään, hän tekee töitä, ettei näin enää kävisi Venäjälle, koska on jo käynyt kahdesti vuonna 1917 ja 1990-luvulla. (Puhumatta kahdesta kauheasta sodasta.)


 

Tietysti, hän ei ole mikään tavallinen heppu, vaikka yrittää näyttää siltä, vaan hyvin älykäs, lahjakas ja monipuolinen ihminen. Hän on hyvin koulutettu, hyvin lukenut, kokenut ja erittäin hyvin informoitu ihminen. Hän on myös luonnostaan hyvin ujo, kohtelias ja vieraanvarainen. Näin hänen vieraansa sanovat. Muistakaa myös, että hän on koulutukseltaan juristi, ja ammatiltaan tiedustelija ja judomestari. Ei mikään tavallinen heppu.


Niin kookkaan ja omaperäisen maan johtajana hän varmasti tuntee, niin kuin hän on sanonutkin julkisesti, että lopullinen vastuu Venäjällä kaikesta on maan Presidentillä. Eli, hänellä. Ja niin se todellakin on. Reilua tai ei, mutta näin on. Jopa asioista, joissa hänellä ei ole osaa eikä arpaa. Kansa kohdistaa kaiken maansa johtajaan.




Kuvitelkaapa hetkeksi tilanteen, jossa Te olette suuren yrityksen johtaja ja työntekijät sabotoivat kaikki hienot uudistuksenne, jotka ehdotatte. Nyökkäävät, sanovat "Juu-juu, hieno homma", eivätkä tee mitään. Kuka on vastuussa? - johtaja, tietenkin. Löytyykö neuvoja tilanteen ratkaisemiseksi? No, sehän on selvä - antaa potkut sabotoijille. Onko se niin helppoa maassa, jossa lännen kovista ja onnistuneista ponnistuksista kylmän sodan voittamiseksi, maan talous- ja poliittiset rakenteet on rikottu, ryöstetty, valloitettu niillä, jotka ehtivät ryövätä eniten silloin 90-luvulla? Epäilen.

Nämä vuodet (1990-luku) jäävät Venäjän kansan muistiin kauhuna - nälänhätänä, häpeänä, epätoivona, hämmennyksenä, nöyryytyksenä, pelkona. Lännessä - "Suurena demokratian voittona". 10 miljoonaa kuolleita ilman mitään sotaa. Vai, että ilman sotaa...

Onko se ymmärretty lännessä? Millä keinoin länsi on ”voittanut” Venäjää? Epäilen. Lännelle se oli Kylmän Sodan suurvoitto. Kommunismin tuhoa. Neuvostoliiton (suuren kilpailijan) loppua. Ei muuta.

Maan monimuotoinen talous ja rakenne hajotettiin omin käsin, nehän olivat kaikki venäläisiä – ne talousneuvokset, jotka talousuudistuksia toteuttivat. "Itsehän te sen teitte", sanovat tänä päivänä amerikkalaiset neuvonantajat, joita oli silloin hallituksessa tuhansittain. Ja mistähän ansioista he jakelivat toisilleen "Kylmän Sodan Voitto"- mitaleita? (Clinton)

Muistaako kukaan, mitä se kommunismi on? Paitsi totaalista kontrollointia (niin kuin lännessä nyt) ja kovaäänisten rettelöitsijöiden kiinniottamista (niin kuin lännessä on aina tehty)?

Se oli ilmaista kansan koulutusta kaikilla asteilla, sosiaalista tasa-arvoa ja tukea kaikille, työttömyyden puutetta, tasaista palkkojen rajoittamista alas- ja ylöspäin. Ilmaista terveydenhuoltoa, alhaista elintarvikkeiden hintatasoa. Asuntoja kaikille pikkuhinnoin. (Joo, ei aivan kaikille vielä erillisiä asuntoja silloin, liian iso maa, mutta kuitenkin. Ei kodittomia.)

Ja niille, jotka sanovat, että tietyistä elintarvikkeista oli pulaa ja tavarat ja palvelut huonoja ja liian vähän, vastaan, kyllä, näin oli ajoittain. (En puhu tässä 90-luvusta, koska nämä pulat olivat osittain keinotekoisia.)

Mutta peruselintarvikkeita oli aina ja kohtuullisen hyviä, luonnollisia, maukkaita. Vaatteita ommeltiin paljon itse, hyvistä jalkineista oli vähän pulaa. Mutta niitä tuotiin Suomesta. Maan talous oli niin laajaa ja monipuolista, että lännen yrittäjien oli vaikea edes käsittää sitä. Kulutustavaroille ei riitänyt vielä silloin tarpeeksi huomiota ja varoja. Oli tärkeimpia asioita, kuten maan puolustus.

Puolustus ei ollut ainoa rahanreikä, oli vielä USA:n yllyttämä kilpavarustelu. Kansantalous käsitti laajoja liike-elämän alueita elitarviteollisuudesta ja avaruuslennoista ja tutkimuksista suuriin vesi- ja ydinvoimaloihin. Raskasteollisuuden suurtehtaista valtaviin rautatie- ja lentotieverkostoihin. Venäjällä oli maailman suurin kaupallinen ja sotilaallinen laivasto.

Mitä länttä kismitti tässä asiassa eniten se, että kaikki nämä laitokset, varat ja aktiivit toimivat ilman voittoa - 0-voitolla. Kaikki verot, kustannukset ja investoinnit huomattiin, mutta voittoa ei. Ei ollut laskettu. Toisenlainen toimintaperiaate.

Sehän on kuolemanvaarallista lännen teollisuuden ja yrittäjyyden periaatteille. Se katkaisee ahneuden pyrkimykset saada aina enemmän ja enemmän. Loputtomiin, niin kuin näemme tänä päivänä.

Vientikauppa, kyllä, toimi lännen voittoperiaatteilla. Valuuttavaroja kaivattiin, Venäjähän eli saarrossa. Sanktioiden alla. Koko Neuvostoliiton historiansa. Suomi vähän auttoi silloin tällöin teknologioiden hankinnoissa, omalla edullaan, tietenkin.

Venäjän sisällä kansa eli tasaisen hyvin (kohtuullisesti) ja puutteet kärsivällisesti kestettiin. Teatteri, taide ja kirjallisuus korvasivat hienon mekon puuttumisen. Tietysti, olisi kivaa, jos vaatteitakin olisi vähän runsaammin. Mutta sanokaa rehellisesti, minkä valitsette nyt: kulttuurin vai mahdollisuuden vaihtaa mekkoja tai pukuja joka kuukausi?

Rajoitettu kulutus oli ainoa todellinen ongelma Venäjällä, vanhentuneen retoriikan rinnalla. Ihmiset, jotka eivät pystyneet korvaamaan kulutusvajettaan kulttuurilla, olivat närkästyneitä. Mutta sellaisia ihmisiä ei ollut kovin paljon ja vaan sellaisia, joilla oli ylimääräistä rahaa jostakin.

Tilannetta parannettiin koko ajan, ja kysymyksessä oli reformien tarve eikä purkutöiden tai kaiken kumottamisen. Piti arvioida uudestaan ja korjata ja parantaa. Mennä eteenpäin siitä hyvästä, joka oli jo saatu aikaan. Jatkaa ainutlaatuista onnistunutta kokeilua, kehittää sitä.

Ulkomaalaiset vertailivat Venäjän oloja jossain syrjässä omiin sieviin amerikkalaisten rahoilla jälleen rakennettuihin pikkumaihin ja kauhistuivat 1980-luvulla. Ennen he eivät kauhistuneet niin äänekkäästi, koska kotonakin oli köyhyyttä ja puutetta sodan jälkeen. On sitä lännessä nykyäänkin, mutta se on peitetty niin hyvin sosiaalietuuksilla ja taitavalla retoriikalla.

Joo, ongelmiakin oli. Muistan itsekin, kun Suomeen muuton jälkeen olin niin ylpeä lännen järjestelyistä ja järjestyksestä. Se kesti siihen asti kun SNTL oli olemassa. Heti, kun painostava esimerkki haihtui, lännessä alkoi hyvinvointivaltioiden purku.

Yhtäkkiä suomalainen terveyshuolto rupesi takkuilemaan, suomalainen rakennustaito, josta oltiin niin ylpeitä, lakkasi olemasta niin hyvä, koska Venäjän rakennusmarkkinoille ilmestyneet turkit ja jugoslaavit eivät rakentaneet samoilla periaatteilla, kuin suomalaiset, ja olivat paljon halvempia. Ja kun suomalaiset laskivat laatutasoa, heitä ei haluttu enää lainkaan - liian huonoa työtä liian kalliisti. Työnvalvonta oli kaikki, mitä jäi suomalaisille siitä kilvasta, ja sitten sekin loppui. Kun Neuvostoliitto romahti. Sitten yhtäkkiä hävisi koko työväki. Nykyään Suomessa rakentavat puolalaiset ja virolaiset - halvalla ja melko hyvin. Rakennusvalvojat ovat edelleen pakosta suomalaisia, tekee rahaa venäläisten rakennuttajien viranomaiskäytäntöjen tietämättömyydellä.

Mikään ei romahda itsestään, sehän on selvä. Silloista SNTL:n tilannetta arvioitiin monesti eri eksperttien voimalla, myös ulkomaalaisten. Rakennekriisin merkkejä todettiin, muttei järjestelmäkriisiä. Eli, tarvittiin muutoksia, ei purkamista.

Mutta, Venäjällä, jossa eliitti ja kansa ovat kuin kahdelta eri planeetalta, ja toisen aikomuksiin yhteiskunnan kehittäminen ei oikein kuulu agendaan enää lainkaan, on vaikea vaatia vastuuseen eliittiä, joka, karkeasti sanottuna, halusi vaan yhtä asiaa - länteen - Lontooseen asumaan pysyvästi, kun siellä kaikki on niin ihanaa. Katsokaas, kun Venäjällä englantilainen kirjallisuus oli melkein saman verran suosittu kun venäläinen. Christie ja Conan Doyle. Eliitin keskuudessa, tietysti. Ja Amerikassa on VAPAUTTA!

Mitä hiton vapautta, kukaan ei ajatellut. Vapautta mistä? Yhteiskunnallisesta velvollisuudestako? Tasa-arvostako? Vai vapauttaa kuluttaa pimeästi saatuja rahoja, kun toinen näkee nälkää?

Sitten ajateltiin, että, jos ei saa vapaasti muuttaa länteen, niin Venäjästä pitää tehdä länsi, että voi tuhlata ja elää eurooppalaisittain ”kauniisti” kotona pelkäämättä kansan tuomitsevia katseita tai rikostutkintaa. Kuulostaako tutulta? Joo, nämä ajatukset ovat samanlaisia kuin vuosi sitten Maidanilla Kiovassa, Ukrainassa. Kansa haluaa elää ”kauniisti” eurooppalaisittain. Rikkaat haluavat eroon kansasta, ei muuta. Tämä sosiaalisuus on niin tylsää, me olemme parempia, parhaimpia, parhaita, meidän kuuluu saada enemmän, onhan meillä rahaakin. Kenellekään ei kuulu, että rahat ovat pimeitä tai anastettuja heidän omalta kansaltaan. Demokratiaa ja Eurooppaa! (Oikeastaan, Amerikkaa! mutta siitä ei puhuta...)

Ja silloin Neuvostoliiton aikana radioasemat "Vapaus", "Amerikan ääni" (USA), "Saksan aalto", "BBC", "Radio Suomi" ja muut Venäjälle 70-luvulla suunnatut propagandakanavat tekivät hyvää työtä valehtelemalla päivästä toiseen lännen ihanuudesta. Nyt tiedän sen varmasti, koska kuuntelin niitä silloin, ja tiedän nyt, mistä oli kyse, läntinen propaganda oli hyvä, hyvin ammattilaista. Huomioon otettiin kaikki - äänen sävy, mielenkiintoiset kulttuuriuutiset, nykymusiikkia, ihmisarvon, sananvapauden ja ulkomailla liikkumisen vapauden pönkittämistä, läntisen elintason korkeuden popularisointia jne. Ja nämä ohjelmat olivat iloisia: kevyesti eurooppalaisittain iloisia, jopa silloin kun puhuttiin jostain vakavasta Venäjällä. No, nehän ovat hyviä asioita, vieläkin. Unohdettiin vaan lännen ongelmat. Mutta sehän ei kuulu propagandakanavien tehtäviinkään - omista ongelmistaan kertominen viholliselle.

Venäjä pidettiin vihollisena aina, ja syystäkin. Venäjä on liian suuri. Ajoittain liian mahtava sotilaallisesti. Ajoittain liian mahtava taloudellisesti. Venäjällä on aina ollut runsasti luonnonvaroja ja tilaa. Ihmisiäkin on ollut aina tarpeeksi (vain sotien jälkeen liian vähän). Margaret Thatcher puhui usein siitä, että Venäjä ei ollut niin vaarallinen ideologisesti, vaan taloudellisesti. Oli oikeassa. Venäjä oli taloudellisesti nousussa koko ajan, jatkuvasti.

Ideologia oli nimenomaan se, mitä piti maan sisällä muuttaa, vähän nykyaikaistaa, ei muuttaa kokonaan, vaan katsoa uudestaan ja korjata. Perusideathän oli hyviä. Piti poistaa vanhentuneita käsitteitä, kansa oli jo kouluttautunut aika korkealle tasolle ja ymmärsi paljon enemmän, kun ennen. Venäläiset olivat maailman lukevin kansa. Ja nauravin. Kansa nauroi vanhoille tyhjille sloganeille ja vanhoille johtajille, jotka eivät pystyneet puhumaan enää kunnolla. Ja sitten vielä se läntinen propaganda.

Ajat muuttuivat. Venäjän filosofien olisi pitänyt kehittää sosialista ajattelua eteenpäin. Asettaa uusia moderneja tavoitteita. Näin ei tapahtunut, pidettiin kiinni vanhasta marksilaisuudesta, vaikka todellisuus ei ollut edes rakennettu siihen. Kukaan ei lukenut enää Marksia lainkaan, ja jos luki, niin kuin mieheni, huomasi, että kaikki ei ollut kohdallaan. I. Stalinilla oli omaperäinen ja toimiva ajatus Venäjän tulevaisuudelle ja se ei ollut marksilaista. Ja se oli oikea ratkaisu Venäjälle, sen ymmärretään vasta nyt.

Marksin teoriat, osittain hyvin osuvat ja perustellut, osittain aivan virheelliset, eivät katsoneet kansallisesti eteenpäin, eivätkä ottaneet huomioon tavallista yksittäistä ihmistä. Siinä ajateltiin massoilla, voimilla ja suurilla väestön luokilla. Siinä ajateltiin planetaarisesti - globaalisesti. Kuulostaa tutulta?

Nyt vasta selviää, että sekin teoria oli osana Venäjän vastaista provokaatiota ja paljon suurempaa suunnitelmaa. Marks, muuten, avoimesti vihasi slaaveja ja oli russofobi. Ja hänen oppinsa päätavoite oli vain heikentää tai mieluummin poistaa Venäjä kokonaan päivän järjestyksestä - poliittisesti ja taloudellisesti.

Kaikki meni mönkään - pahasti, sekä vallankumous että kansallissota, I-maailmansota 1914-1918 ja Venäjän kansallissodan jälkeinen rakentaminen. Venäjä nousi taas tuhkasta. Sosiaalisena valtiona. Tarvittiin uutta sotaa.

Venäjä oli jo pitkään poikennut Marksin osoittamalta tieltä rakentamalla aivan omaa järjestelmään ja kulkemalla aivan omaa tietään. Vasten venäläisen eliitin tahtoa, joka on pettänyt kansansa silloin, vallankumousta edeltävinä aikoina, sitten 90-luvulla ja yrittää kovasti nyt. Onneksi, ei koko eliitti, vaan sen pieni merkityksetön osa.

Venäjä on aina uhannut ja vaarantanut kaikkea, mitä Länsi edusti. Venäläinen sosiaalinen valtion esimerkki (ja sodan jälkeen myös sosialististen maiden esimerkki) painosti länsimmäiset aateliset, suuryrittäjät ja suuromaisuuksien haltijat jakamaan hyvinvointiaan kansalaistensa kanssa lännessäkin. Siitä - "hyvinvointivaltioita" Euroopassa.

Onko kukaan huomannut, että heti Neuvostoliiton ns. "romahduksen" jälkeen, länsimäissä alkoi hiljainen supistusliike - hyvinvointivaltiot rupesivat supistamaan kansanetuja. Se oli hämmästyttävää venäläisille, jotka sinisilmäisesti uskoivat propagandaan, että Lännessä oli kaikki hyvin, kapitalismi toimii ja markkina säätelee hyvinvointia itse kaikkialle.

Kapitalismin kokeilujen jälkeen, Venäjän kansa on pettynyt. Kapitalismi ei toimi Venäjällä. Se on epäreilua. Se tuo pintaan ihmisten ahneutta, julmuutta ja eriarvoisuutta. Venäjän sosialistinen järjestelmä kaikkine huonoine piirteineen ei sitä tehnyt. Päinvastoin, se taisteli niitä vastaan, tasoitti ja sovitteli niitä. Ihmiset kannustivat tätä oikeana suuntana. Mutta sitten pikkuhiljaa rupesivat ajattelemaan, että kapitalismikin tekee samaa, mutta takaa ihmisille myös aineellista runsautta ja henkilökohtaista vapautta, ilman valtion hermoille käyvää valvontaa ja ideologista idiotismia.

Sitten tultiin siihen tilanteeseen, kun vuonna 1991 lännenvastaisia ajattelijoita Venäjällä oli vain 6 %, mutta sitten vuonna 2014 – 71 %.

Jos joillakin on vielä epäilyjä Venäjää vastaisista pakotteista, että ne johtuvat Krimin yhdistämisestä takaisin Venäjään kansan pyynnöstä, niin ajatelkaa uudestaan.

Näitä sanktioita olisi tullut joka tapauksessa. Krimi tai ei-Krimiä. Nehän alkoivat jo ennen Ukrainan kriisiä. Ne alkoivat Presidentin puheesta Munchenissa 2007. Suorista sanoista ja itsenäisestä asenteesta. Ja jatkuivat Syyrian pelastamisesta USA:n pommituksilta. Vahva itsenäinen Venäjä ei palvele länsimaiden intressejä. Raaka-aineiden toimittajana - kyllä, mutta ei muuten.

Länsimaiden poliitikot ihmettelevät "Venäjän Aatetta" ja "Venäjän Maailmaa" - käsitteitä. Luulevat, että ne ovat ekspansionistisia laajentamiseen tähtääviä aggressiivisia panslavistisia aatteita. Ymmärrän. Lännessä ajatellaan omalla ymmärrettävällä tavalla.

Mutta Venäjän Aatehan on oikeudenmukaisuus jokaista ihmistä kohtaan, koska hän on Jumalan kuva vaikka ei aina sitä ymmärrä tai tiedosta itsekään.

Aika kova viesti, vai mitä? Mitäs sitten kaikki teoriat "rahvaasta", villeistä ja barbaareista, "valistuneista ja valituista herroista" ja kovan työn tarpeellisuudesta onnensa ja leipäänsä eteen? Euroopassa ajatus ihmisen tasa-arvoisuudesta ruvettiin toteuttamaan vasta 80-90-luvulla todenteoilla eikä pelkästään sanoilla, niin kuin ennen ja Neuvostoliiton sosiaalisen mallin painostuksen alla.

Mutta ”Venäjän maailma"- käsite on vielä pahempi. Se väittää, että kaikki venäläiset ja venäläissukuiset (slaavit) tai venäjämieliset, jotka hyväksyvät yllämainitun Venäjän Aatteen ja puhuvat venäjää, ovat yhtä ja samaa yhteisöä missä tahansa maailmassa. Ja tätä yhteisöllisyyttä Venäjä pyrkii tukemaan ja puolustamaan, jos sitä uhataan jollakin tavalla. Se on panslavistinen ajatus Slaavien Suuresta V eljeydestään oikeudenmukaisuuden taistelussa pahaa vastaan.

Nyt ymmärrätte, miksi slaavilainen Jugoslavia, jossa koskaan ei ollut mitään eripuraa omien muslimiensa kanssa on nyt hajallaan. Ymmärrätte, miksi Bulgariaa vedetään kauemmaksi Venäjältä vaikka Venäjä on aina ajatellut Bulgariaa veljeskansana ja on valmis auttamaan sitä taloudellisesti, niin kuin Serbiaa, Slovakiaa, Sloveniaa yms.

Venäjällä on aina katsottu Puolaakin veljeskansana, vaikka se on ollut aina Venäjän pahimpia vihollisia. Niin, kuin Ukrainan pro-läntinen entinen Habsburgilainen länsiosa Galitsia.

Tähän ilmiöön on viime vuonna etsitty kovasti syitä ja selityksiä, koska varsinaiset Ukrainan asukkaat eli ”malorossit” ovat samaa kansaa kuin valkovenäläiset ja venäläisetkin. ”Suuret Ukrit” ovat taas länsiukrainalaisia, jotka ovat nyt kaapanneet vallan Kiovassa. Mutta juuri nämä länsiukrainalaiset eivät ole slaaveja. Se on aivan toisenlainen kansa.

Enkä puhu tässä tavallisista ihmisistä, heillä on omat käsityksensä asiasta, jotka ovat joskus aivan toisenlaisia ja joskus median muokkaamia. Puhun poliitikoista ja poliittisista ”pelaajista”. Heidän rahoittajilla taas ei ole mitään käsityksiä paitsi finansseihin liittyviä. Ei mitään henkilökohtaista, vaan liiketoimintaa.

Näiden kahden maiden, siis Puolan ja Ukrainan, poliittisten tekijöiden vihaa Venäjää kohtaan hämmästyttää ja ihmetyttää venäläisiä. Menee pikkuisen yli laitaa. Ja syitä löytyy - ne ovat vanhat "hyvät" kateus ja kunnianhimo. Vanhat historialliset alueelliset ja poliittiset kiemurat, häviöt ja ambiitiot.

Puolan "shliahta" (шляхта) - vanhat vaeltavat vapaat ritarit - aatelisto haaveilee entisestä suuruudestaan ja Puolan Keisarikunnastaan. Puola ei ole mikään osaa ”venäläistä maailmaa”, se on osa ”katolilaista eurooppalaista maailmaa”, venäläisten pitää jo oivaltaa tämä - slaavina oleminen ei taata vielä slaavilaiseen maailmaan kuulumista.

Venäläiset eivät tajuaa sitä. Heille Venäjän tataaritkin ovat venäläistä maailmaa – ja he muuten ovatkin, heidän omasta mielestään, vaikka ovat muslimeja. Ajatus- ja arvomaailma on sama.

Mutta Vatikaani on aina ollut kireä Venäjän Ortodoksiselle Kirkolle ihan kilpailijana vaikutusvallasta ja kaikesta, mitä siitä vallasta seuraa. Se näkyy niin hyvin nyt Ukrainassa, jossa rikotaan, suljetaan ja poltetaan Ortodoksisia kirkkoja ja terrorisoidaan (ja jopa tapetaan) pappeja. ”Uniatit” (katolilaismieliset) radikaalit ovat hyvin esillä politiikassa.

Puola on katolinen maa, jonka kirkko on aina taistellut vaikutusvallasta Venäjällä ja joskus hyvin onnistuneestikin. Pieni osa venäläistä aatelistoa on puolalaista syntyperää, puolalaisia oli paljon Venäjän tsaarien hoveissa uraa tekemässä, osa venäläisiä muutti uskontoa ja siirtyi katolilaisiksi. Se on totta. Myös pitkään Puola oli osana Venäjän Keisarikuntaa, mikä kismitti sikäläistä aatelistoa eniten. Uskonto on myös propagandan taisteluase. Se on vanha ikuinen taistelu, joka on tuttu myös protestanteille Euroopassa.

Ukrainasta en halua puhua tässä sen enempää, siitä on kirjoitettu jo aika paljon. Tilanne lienee jo aika selvä kaikille, jotka halusivat saada siitä selvyyden, vaikka asia on monimutkainen.

Pitää vaan muistaa, että tämä Ukrainan väestön osa on hyvin pieni ja siitäkin vain pieni osa todella vihaa Venäjää - geneettisesti. Juuri se pieni vähemmistö taisteli Natsi Saksan rinnalla Venäjää ja muita Euroopan maita vastaan. Heidän jälkeläisensä seisoivat myöhäis-Maidanilla ja tukivat vallankaappausta. He vihaavat myös puolalaisia. Ja ovat tappaneet myös heitä sodan aikana (”Volinin teurastukset” – 80 000 tapettua puolalaista). Tssss.... ei tästä tarvitse puhua lainkaan.

Puolalaisilla oli paljon maatiloja Ukrainassa, joita hallinnoivat heidän puolestaan juutalaiset tilanhoitajat. Viimeiset käyttivät valtaansa pikkusen liian leveästi, esimerkiksi, ottivat kirkkojen käytöstä vuokramaksuja asukkailta, levittivät viinaa joka paikkaan ja omistivat ”shinok-kapakoita”, joissa voi juoda velaksi, kaikkine seuraamuksineen. Sekä tietysti antoivat rahaa velaksi korolla. Tavallinen juttu. Niin, "paneista" (puolalaisista maaomistajista) ja ”zidvasta” (ukrainan juutalaisista) ei kovin paljon tykätä nykyaikanakaan.

Mutta kukaan koskaan ei vihannut puolalaisia eikä juutalaisia Ukrainassa, ne on vanhoja asioita, niistä ei paljon puhuttu ja oli melkein unohdettu Neuvostoliiton aikana. Molempia kansallisuuksia on aika hyvin edustettu nyky-Ukrainassa.

Mutta vihaa tarvittiin taas kipeästi Ukrainan asukkaiden yhdistämiseen. Radikaalit nostivat "kolminaisuuden" kansallislipuilleen. ”Ukraina ilman katsappeja/moskaaleja (venäläisiä), puolalaisia ja zidvaa” – Oleg Tiagnibokin puheista. Sitten puolalaiset ja juutalaiset katosivat slogaaneista. Muuten puolalaisilta ei olisi saatu apua uudelle hallitukselle, juutalaiset ovat kovasti kaappauksen takana järjestäjinä ja rahoittajina (Kolomoiski). Vihollinen oli valittu – Venäjä.

Argumentoida vihaansa kunnolla he eivät osaa, heidän käyttämiä väitteitään ovat naurettavia: kuten se, että Venäjä käyttää Ukrainaa hyväkseen taloudellisesti, Ukraina on ylläpitänyt Venäjän elintarviketuotantoa ja ilman sitä Venäjä kuolee nälkään.

En kommentoi sellaisia lausuntoja, katsokaa itse tilastoja. Ja Venäjä ei ole vieläkään kuollut nälkään vaikka Ukraina kuuluu elintarvike-embargon piiriin. Venäjä ei vastaanota tällä hetkellä mitään elintarvikkeita Ukrainasta, koska se salakujettaa alueella kiellettyjä elintarvikkeita Euroopasta ja sen oma elintarviketerveystarkastus on remballaan.

Mutta "todellinen" syy vihaan on varmasti se, kansallismielisen radikaaliliikkeen mukaan, että Ukraina on aina ollut SuurVenäjän varjossa. Sekin väite kumoutuu, kun katsotaan Ukrainan asemaa Neuvostoliitossa.

Mutta Venäjän ja Ukrainan välisiä muita todellisia suhteita ja siteita on niin paljon, ja ne oli katkaistu niin tyhmästi ja julmasti, että siitä maksetaan vielä pitkään. Se on tosiasia.

Nämä ovat vain pieni osa asioita, joista Venäjän Presidentti ”luulee” olevansa vastuussa. Venäjän jälleenrakentaminen "romahduksen" jälkeen ja taloudellinen nousu on hänen ansiotaan. "Uus-venäläisten" ("uus-rikkaiden") kuriin saattaminen myös. Ulkomaalaisten omistajien poistyöntäminen raaka-ainekaupan omistuksesta myös. Venäjän luonnonvarat ovat tänä päivänä taas suuremmalta osin Venäjän omia.

Kansan uusi kansallinen (isänmaallinen) varmuus ja ylpeys maastaan liitetään Presidenttiin.

Näin ollen, presidentti Putin ei ole Venäjällä ongelmaa, niin kuin länsi ja osa venäläistä sisäistä oppositiota väittää, vaan ratkaisu. Sellaiseksi hän itseään varmasti vähän luuleekin, vaikka ei arvosta omaa persoonaan kovin kummasti, sanoo, että hän ei merkitse mitään, Venäjä merkitsee kaiken, ja että maassa kunnon ihmisiä löytyy.

Kansa tukee Presidenttiaan ratkaisuna, riipumatta siitä, hyväksyykö länsi tätä tai ei. Oikeastaan ei kansa kovin paljon siitä lännestä enää välitäkään.

E. Pyyhtiä 24.1.2015

perjantai 16. tammikuuta 2015

Carl Barbie to BP - no top punishment for ruining the Gulf

BP avoids maximum punishment, faces $13.7bn fine over Gulf oil spill

Published time: January 16, 2015 11:38
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Reuters / Athit Perawongmetha


UK oil giant BP faces a maximum $13.7 billion in penalties from the Deepwater Horizon Gulf of Mexico oil spill in 2010, which many claim to be the worst environmental disaster in US history. The fine is much less than the $18 billion feared.

The US District Judge Carl Barbie (
relative to Klaus Barbie ? - "the butcher of Lyon"? EP.) ruled Thursday that the company spilled 3.19 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico in April 2010, less than previously claimed by the US government. The court, which earlier ruled the company acted negligently in the lead up to the spill has not determined a final penalty.

Had the court ruled BP was “grossly negligent” instead of just “negligent” in their cleanup efforts, the company could have been slapped with an $18 billion fine. This means BP can only be fined $1,100 per barrel spilled, instead of $4,300 per barrel under a “gross negligence” ruling.

READ MORE: Supreme Court rejects BP appeal over oil spill payments



BP has already spent more than $28 billion in spill response, cleanup and claims.

Avoiding the maximum fine sent BP Plc shares up 1 percent Thursday on US floors, and on Friday shares continue to climb 2.83 percent to £403.73 in London at 10:00am GMT.

BP issued a formal statement in reaction to the ruling on Thursday confirming the company will be subject to the Clean Water Act (CWA) penalty, and said it is still reviewing the court's decision.

Europe’s third largest company has already spent more than $40 billion in cleanup and claim costs for the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, which was the result of an offshore oil rig exploding, killing 11 people and spewing nearly 5 million barrels of oil into the Gulf, leaving behind an oily ring the size of Rhode Island on the seafloor.

The British company’s reputation has been severally tarnished by the incident, both in the US and worldwide, and the stock price indicates this blacklash, but it has slowly recovered, and this ruling may be one of the final chapters in the spill saga.




Reuters / Baz Ratner


BP baggage

The favorable ruling in the Deepwater Horizon case doesn’t mean the company’s legal woes are over. It is still in the settlement process for a separate spill-related case in Louisiana, which is expected to bring $18 billion in Clean Water Act penalties. After that, BP can still be hit with bills from the Natural Resources Damage Assessment, as well as a string of other claims.

BP has been downsizing since the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, and in December announced plans to cut 300 from its 4,000 employees in the North Sea Division, as well as back office analysts. BP has 84,000 employees worldwide, 15,000 of whom are based in the UK and 20,000 in the US.

READ MORE: Supreme Court rejects BP appeal over oil spill payments

Falling oil prices are also taking its toll on the oil major. Since peak oil prices of $115 in June, futures have dropped nearly 60 percent, dropping below $45 per barrel for the first time in 6 years this week.

Low prices are fueled by the current oversupply in oil paired with over production in OPEC countries, Russia, and the US.

One of the main liabilities of the company is that it has invested heavily in Russia, and it owns a nearly 20 percent stake in Rosneft, the Russian state-run oil company.

READ MORE: BP profits plummet 21% as Russia sanctions bite
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torstai 15. tammikuuta 2015

100 foreign fighters executed by ISIS for trying to quit - report

Published time: December 20, 2014 19:43
Edited time: December 22, 2014 13:55
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AFP/ISIL
6.6K1.6K4

ISIS ‘military police’ executed 100 foreign fighters who attempted to quit and flee from the insurgents’ de-facto capital of Raqqa in northern Syria as frustration among militants has been growing, a UK newspaper reported citing a witness activist.

“Local fighters are frustrated — they feel they’re doing most of the work and the dying . . . foreign fighters who thought they were on an adventure are now exhausted,” an activist, opposed to both the Syrian regime and Islamic State (formerly known as ISIS/ISIL), told The Financial Times newspaper, which claims the source is reliable.

The activist said he had "verified 100 executions of foreign ISIS fighters trying to flee the northern Syrian city of Raqqa.”

The media reported that the insurgents created a “military police to crack down” on those unwilling to serve the so-called Islamic State.

In a bid to control how jihadists fulfill their tasks, the IS reportedly created some kind of documentation. The paper also reported, citing activists, that many fighters serving the IS have been arrested after their homes were raided.

“In Raqqa, they have arrested 400 members so far and printed IDs for the others,” the activist who asked his name to be withheld for security reasons said.

He also said that some fighters have become discontent and frustrated with their leaders and disillusioned with the realities of fighting for IS, through warning the change of mood “doesn’t affect the hardcore people of ISIS.”

READ MORE: Indian jihadist ‘kills 55 for ISIS, quits because no pay’

According to the report, foreign militants have often been the most active in major battles, but most of the demands are put on local fighters.

“They feel they are the ones going to die in big numbers on the battlefield but they don’t enjoy any of the foreigners’ benefits — high salaries, a comfortable life, female slaves,” the activist from Deir Ezzor said.




AFP/ISIL



Another problem in the ISIS ranks is growing tensions between fighters of different ethnic groups, the report says.

“Many fighters apparently group themselves by ethnicity or nationality — a practice which undermines ISIS’s claim to be ridding Muslims of national borders,” The Financial Times reported.
A point of no return?

Volunteers to fight for ISIS have been flocking to the region from all over the world. Up to 11,000 fighters from 74 nations had gone to Syria to fight for militant groups during the protracted civil war with up to 2,800 from the West, the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation at King's College London (ICSR) estimated last year.

France, Germany and the UK account for the largest number of citizens fighting with militants in Syria. UK media reported in September that five disillusioned Britons accompanied by three Frenchmen, two Germans and two Belgians were stripped of their weapons and taken prisoner by their militant commanders after an attempt to flee Syria.

READ MORE: 5 Brits join ISIS each month, 1 dies every 3 weeks

In November, British PM David Cameron said that ISIS jihadists returning from the conflict region will be barred from coming home. Between 30 and 50 Britons want to return but fear they face jail, according to researchers at ICSR.

In September, France's parliament opened a debate on a bill to cope with the terrorism threat. Bill aims at imposing a travel ban on those suspected of planning terror activities.

Meanwhile, the first German was to be tried for fighting with ISIS was sentenced to 45 months in jail in December. German Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere has urged to “especially prevent [the militants’] return as fighters to carry out attacks in Europe."

READ MORE: ‘Terrorism exported to Middle East from Europe’ – Assad

The militants have experienced losses in the past weeks. On Thursday Iraqi Kurds claimed they broken IS siege of Iraq's Sinjar mountain during a two-day attack, involving 8,000 peshmerga fighters and US-led airstrikes, AFP reported. The victory freed hundreds of people from Iraq's Yazidi religious minority, who had been trapped on the mountain since August. At the same time US Pentagon announced the strikes killed several ISIS leaders.

tiistai 6. tammikuuta 2015

A coup followed by an ethnic cleansing is nazi, not at all democratic


CZECH PRESIDENT: “ONLY POORLY INFORMED PEOPLE” DON’T KNOW ABOUT UKRAINE COUP
A coup followed by an ethnic cleansing is nazi, not at all democratic



Image Credits: Miloslav Hamřík, Wikimedia Commons


by ERIC ZUESSE | INFOWARS.COM | JANUARY 5, 2015


The Czech Republic’s President Milos Zeman said, in an interview, in the January 3rd edition of Prague’s daily newspaper Pravo, that Czechs who think of the overthrow of Ukraine’s President Viktor Yanukovych, on 22 February 2014, as having been like Czechoslovakia’s authentically democratic “Velvet Revolution” are seeing it in a profoundly false light, because, (as Russian Television translated his statement into English) “Maidan was not a democratic revolution.” He said that this is the reason why Ukraine now is in a condition of “civil war,” in which the residents of the Donbass region in Ukraine’s southeast have broken away from the Ukrainian Government.

He furthermore said that, “Judging by some of the statements of Prime Minister Yatsenyuk, I think that he is rather a prime minister of war because he does not want a peaceful solution, as recommended by the European Union (EU), but instead prefers to use force.”

He added, by way of contrast to Yatsenyuk, the possibility that Ukraine’s President, Petro Poroshenko “might be a man of peace.” So: though Zeman held out no such hope regarding Yatsenyuk (who was Obama’s choice to lead Ukraine), he did for Poroshenko (who wasn’t Obama’s choice, but who became Ukraine’s President despite Obama’s having wanted Yatsenyuk’s sponsor, the hyper-aggressive Yulia Tymoshenko, to win the May 25thPresidential election, which was held only in Ukraine’s pro-coup northwest, but claimed to possess authority over the entire country).

What this statement from Zeman indicates is that the European Union is trying to deal with Poroshenko, as the “good cop” in a “good cop, bad cop” routine, with Yatsenyuk playing the bad cop; and, so, the EU’s policies regarding Ukraine will depend upon what comes forth from Poroshenko, not at all upon what comes from the more clearly pro-war, anti-peace, Yatsenyuk.

Furthermore, Zeman’s now publicly asserting that the overthrow of Yanukovych was a coup instead of having merely expressed the democratic intentions of most of the Maidan demonstrators, constitutes a sharp break away from U.S. President Barack Obama, who was behind that Ukrainian coup and who endorses its current leaders.

Zeman isn’t yet going as far as Hungary’s President Viktor Orban did in his siding with Russia’s President Putin against America’s President Obama, but Zeman is indicating that, unless Obama will get Poroshenko to separate himself more clearly from Yatsenyuk (whom the U.S. State Department’s Victoria Nuland actually selected on February 4th to become Ukraine’s Prime Minister in the coup just 18 days later, and so there can be no reasonable question that he is an Obama stooge), Czech policy regarding Ukraine will separate away from Obama’s war against Putin, and will join instead with Putin’s defense against Obama’s Ukrainian assault.

Zeman is thus now in very much the same position that Orban had been prior to Orban’s clear decision recently to side with Putin: each is a head-of-state of a former Soviet satellite nation, which had waged a democratic revolution (in 1956 in Hungary, and in 1968 in Czechoslovakia) against the Soviet communist tyranny. He is saying to his own countrymen, that the tyrant now is the United States, under its President Barack Obama, and is not Russia, under its President Vladimir Putin. That’s a seismic shift, away from the U.S., because of the Ukrainian coup.

Zeman was careful in his selection of which Czech news-medium would hold this interview with him. As wikipedia has noted, Pravo “is the only Czech national daily that is not owned by a foreign company.” The message that this fact sends to Czechs is that Zeman wanted to make clear that foreign influences, and any currying of favor with aristocrats (who own the ‘news’ media) in foreign countries, will not dictate his policies; only the Czech Republic’s own democratic values, and the behavior of Poroshenko, will. Zeman is indirectly telling Obama: Back off from me — you’re trying to get too close, and I won’t tolerate this. When Victoria Nuland said “F—k the EU,” she expressed Obama’s view, and all of them recognized the fact; some, like Orban and Zeman, don’t like to be treated this way; others, such as Germany’s Angela Merkel, seem not to mind.

It’s also interesting that the first two EU nations to indicate that they might leave the EU for an alliance with Russia are both former Soviet satellite countries that revolted against the Soviet dictatorship; both are Eastern European, not Western European. Perhaps these leaders are more loathe to be controlled by tyrants than are the ones for whom the very idea of being subordinate to a tyrant is just a mere abstraction. (Merkel, however, seems simply to love whatever is conservative, even if it might happen to be nazi, as in Ukraine.)

In any case, Ukraine’s coup has already produced one earthquake of historical magnitude, in Hungary, with Orban, and might soon do the same in the Czech Republic, with Zeman (which will depend upon Poroshenko reducing his war against Ukraine’s former east — which, in turn, will depend upon what instructions Obama provides to Poroshenko).

The European Union could actually be in the process of breaking up; and not only because of the Ukrainian civil war, but also because Obama’s forcing each and every one of the EU nations to choose up sides in Obama’s Ukrainian war against Putin will have very different economic effects upon the various individual EU member-nations, some of which will lose far more business with Russia, from adhering to Obama’s sanctions against Russia, than will others that go along with those sanctions.

U.S. President Obama is thus now pressing his pedal to the metal in order to achieve maximum destructive force against Russia, regardless of how many or what nations will follow him — perhaps even over the cliff, into a nuclear war. Obama is, in effect, now saying to each and every European head-of-state: Either you’re with us, or you’re against us. He’s George W. Bush II, only with regard to Russia, instead of to Iraq.

It’s “choosing up sides” time, yet again; and, this time, Obama and Putin are both waiting, no doubt each somewhat nervously, to see what his team will consist of, and what the opposing team will turn out to be.

However, there can be no reasonable doubt that Obama was the aggressor here. A coup followed by an ethnic cleansing is nazi, not at all democratic. That’s not opinion; it’s fact; and so it warrants to be noted in a news report, even though (if not especially because) others don’t report this fact, so that it’s still news, for long after it should have been reported as being “news.” Unfortunately, it remains as news, even today.



Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010

R. McGovern: Rebuilding the Obama-Putin Trust


January 3, 2015


Exclusive: Heading into the last quarter of his presidency, Barack Obama must decide whether he will let the neocons keep pulling his strings or finally break loose and pursue a realistic foreign policy seeking practical solutions to world problems, including the crisis with Russia over Ukraine, says ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern.

By Ray McGovern
The year 2015 will surely mark a watershed in relations between the United States and Russia, one way or the other. However, whether tensions increase – to war-by-proxy in Ukraine or an even wider war – or whether they subside depends mostly on President Barack Obama.

Key to answering this question is a second one: Is Obama smart enough and strong enough to rein in Secretary of State John Kerry, the neocons and “liberal interventionists” running the State Department and to stand up to the chicken hawks in Congress, most of whom feel free to flirt with war because they know nothing of it.




Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland, who pushed for the Ukraine coup and helped pick the post-coup leaders.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, by contrast, experienced the effects of war at an early age. He was born in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) eight years after the vicious siege by the German army ended. Michael Walzer, in his War Against Civilians, notes, “More people died in the 900-day siege of Leningrad than in the infernos of Hamburg, Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki taken together.”

Putin’s elder brother Viktor died during the siege. The experience of Putin’s youth is, of course, embedded in his consciousness. This may help to account for why he tends to be short on the kind of daredevil bluster regularly heard from senior Western officials these days – many of whom are ignorant both of suffering from war and the complicated history of Ukraine.

This time last year, few Americans could point out Ukraine on a map. And malnourished as they are on “mainstream media,” most have little idea of its internal political tensions, a schism between a western Ukraine oriented toward Europe and an eastern Ukraine with strong ties to Russia.

Let’s start with a brief mention of the most salient points of this history before addressing its recent detritus — and making a few recommendations as the New Year begins. Less than three weeks after the Berlin Wall fell on Nov. 9. 1989, President George H.W. Bush invited Kremlin leader Mikhail Gorbachev to a summit in Malta where they cut an historic deal: Moscow would refrain from using force to re-impose control over Eastern Europe; Washington would not “take advantage” of the upheaval and uncertainty there.

That deal was fleshed out just two months later, when Bush’s Secretary of State James Baker persuaded Gorbachev to swallow the bitter pill of a reunited Germany in NATO in return for a promise that NATO would not “leapfrog” eastward over Germany. Former U.S. Ambassador to Moscow Jack Matlock, who was witness to all this, told me in an email, “I don’t see how anybody could view the subsequent expansion of NATO as anything but ‘taking advantage.’”

This consummate diplomat, who took part in the critical bilateral talks in early 1990, added that the mutual pledge was not set down in writing. Nonetheless, reneging on a promise – written or not – can put a significant dent in trust.

Why No Written Deal

Last year I asked Matlock and also Viktor Borisovich Kuvaldin, one of Gorbachev’s advisers from 1989 to 1991, why the Baker-Gorbachev understanding was not committed to paper. Matlock replied:

“There was no agreement then. Both Baker and West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher were putting forth ideas for Gorbachev to consider. He did not give an answer but just said he would think about them. … The formal agreements had to involve others, and they did, in the two-plus-four agreement, which was concluded only in late 1990.”

Fair enough.

In an email to me last fall, Kuvaldin corroborated what Matlock told me. But he led off by pointing out “the pledge of no eastward expansion of NATO was made to Gorbachev on consecutive days when he met first with Baker and then with West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl [on Feb. 9 and 10, 1990].” As to why this pledge was not written down, Kuvaldin explained:

“Such a request would have sounded a little bit strange at that time. The Warsaw Pact was alive; Soviet military personnel were stationed all over central Europe; and NATO had nowhere to go. At the beginning of February 1990 hardly anybody could foresee the turn of events in the 1990s.”

Again, fair enough. But when I met Kuvaldin a few months earlier in Moscow and asked him out of the blue why there is no record of the promises given to his boss Gorbachev, his reply was more spontaneous – and visceral. He tilted his head, looked me straight in the eye, and said, “We trusted you.”

Written down or not, it was a matter of trust – and of not “taking advantage.” Kuvaldin’s boss Gorbachev opted to trust not only the U.S. Secretary of State, but also the West German government in Bonn. According to a report in Der Spiegel quoting West German foreign ministry documents released just five years ago:

“On Feb. 10, 1990, between 4 and 6:30 p.m., Genscher spoke with [Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard] Shevardnadze. And, according to the German record of the conversation, Genscher said: ‘We are aware that NATO membership for a unified Germany raises complicated questions. For us, however, one thing is certain: NATO will not expand to the east.’ And because the conversation revolved mainly around East Germany, Genscher added explicitly: ‘As far as the non-expansion of NATO is concerned, this also applies in general.’”

NATO’s Growth Spurt

Some of us – though a distinct minority – know the rest of the story. Generally overlooked in Western media, it nevertheless sets the historical stage as background for the upheaval in Ukraine last year. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 – and the break-up of the Warsaw Pact – Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic joined NATO in 1999. Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovenia, Slovakia, Bulgaria and Romania joined in 2004. Albania and Croatia joined in 2009. And the Kremlin’s leaders could do little more than look on impotently – and seethe.

One can hardly fault those countries, most of which had lots of painful experience at Soviet hands. It is no mystery why they would want to crowd under the NATO umbrella against any foul weather coming from the East. But, as George Kennan and others noted at the time, it was a regrettable lack of imagination and statesmanship that no serious alternatives were devised to address the concerns of countries to the east of Germany other than membership in NATO.

The more so, inasmuch as there were so few teeth left, at the time, in the mouth of the Russian bear. And – not least of all – a promise is a promise.

As NATO expansion drew in countries closer to Russia’s borders, the Kremlin drew a red line when, despite very strong warnings from Moscow, an April 3, 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest declared: “NATO welcomes Ukraine’s and Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations for membership in NATO. We agreed today that these countries will become members of NATO.” Both countries, former Soviet states, press up upon Russia’s soft southern underbelly.

Often forgotten – in the West, but not in Russia – is the impulsive reaction this NATO statement gave rise to on the part of Georgia’s then-President Mikheil Saakashvili, who felt his oats even before the NATO umbrella could be opened. Less than five months after Georgia was put in queue for NATO membership, Saakashvili ordered Georgian forces to attack the city of Tskhinvali in South Ossetia. No one should have been surprised when Russia retaliated sharply, giving Georgian forces a very bloody nose in battles that lasted just five days.

Ultimately, Saakashvili’s cheerleaders of the George W. Bush administration and then-Republican presidential candidate John McCain, who had been egging Saakashvili on, were powerless to protect him. Instead of drawing appropriate lessons from this failed experiment, however, the neocons running the foreign policy of Bush – and remaining inside the Obama administration – set their sights on Ukraine.

One Regime Change Too Many

It is becoming harder to hide the truth that Washington’s ultimate objective to satisfy Ukraine’s “Western aspirations” and incorporate it, ultimately, into NATO was what led the U.S. to mount the coup of Feb. 22, 2014, in Kiev. While it may be true that, as is said, revolutions “will not be televised,” coups d’état can be YouTubed.

And three weeks before the putsch in Kiev, U.S. State Department planning to orchestrate the removal of the Ukraine’s duly elected President Viktor Yanukovych and select new leaders for Ukraine was placed – chapter and verse – on YouTube in the form of a four-minute intercepted telephone conversation between Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland and the yes-ma’am U.S. Ambassador in Kiev, Geoffrey Pyatt.

Hearing is believing. And for those in a hurry, here is a very short transcribed excerpt:

Nuland: What do you think?

Pyatt: I think we’re in play. The Klitschko [Vitaly Klitschko, one of three main opposition leaders] piece is obviously the complicated electron here. … I think that’s the next phone call you want to set up, is exactly the one you made to Yats [Arseniy Yatseniuk, another opposition leader]. And I’m glad you sort of put him on the spot on where he fits in this scenario. And I’m very glad that he said what he said in response.

Nuland: Good. I don’t think Klitsch should go into the government. I don’t think it’s necessary, I don’t think it’s a good idea.

Pyatt: Yeah. I guess … just let him stay out and do his political homework and stuff. … We want to keep the moderate democrats together. The problem is going to be Tyahnybok [Oleh Tyahnybok, the other main opposition leader, head of the far-right Svoboda party] and his guys …

Nuland: [Breaks in] I think Yats is the guy who’s got the economic experience, the governing experience. He’s the … what he needs is Klitsch and Tyahnybok on the outside. He needs to be talking to them four times a week, you know. …

And so, surprise, surprise: “Yats” turned out to be Nuland’s guy just three weeks later, being named prime minister right after the putsch on Feb. 22. And he still is. Talk about luck!

However transparent the dark arts of the “Maidan Marionettes” (the title Russian translators gave the images accompanying their version of the conversation on YouTube), these particular heroics are rarely mentioned in “mainstream” U.S. media (MSM). Instead, pride of place is given to Moscow’s “aggression” in annexing Crimea, a move that followed Crimea’s voters overwhelmingly choosing to bail out on the coup-imposed regime in Kiev and seek to rejoin Russia.

Seeing No Nazis

In the major U.S. media, the violent coup on Feb. 22 – spearheaded by well-organized neo-Nazi militias who killed police and seized government buildings – was whitewashed from what the American people got to see and hear. In the preferred U.S. narrative, Yanukovych and his officials simply decided to leave town because of the moral force from the white-hatted peaceful protesters in the Maidan.

So it came as a welcome surprise when an Establishment notable like George Friedman, during a Dec. 19 interview with the Russian magazine Kommersant, described the February overthrow of the Ukrainian government as “the most blatant coup in history.” Friedman is head of STRATFOR, a think tank often described as a “shadow CIA.”

However, in the mainstream U.S. media’s narrative – as well as others like the BBC where I have had personal experience with the ticklish issue of Ukraine – the story of the Ukraine crisis starts with the annexation of Crimea, which is sometimes termed a Russian “invasion” although Russian troops were already stationed inside Crimea at the Russian naval base at Sevastopol. In the MSM, there is “just not enough time, regrettably” to mention NATO’s eastward expansion or even the coup in Kiev.

The other favored part of the MSM’s narrative is that Putin instigated the Ukraine crisis because he was eager to seize back land lost in the break-up of the Soviet Union. But there is not one scintilla of evidence that the Russians would have taken back Crimea, were it not for the coup engineered by Nuland and implemented by various thugs including openly fascist groups waving banners with Nazi symbols.

Years ago, Nuland fell in with some very seedy companions. The list is long; suffice it to mention here that she served as Principal Deputy National Security Advisor to Vice President Dick Cheney’s in his shadow national security council during the “dark-side” years from 2003 to 2005.

There Nuland reportedly worked on “democracy promotion” in Iraq and did such a terrific job at it that she was promoted, under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, to State Department spokesperson and then to Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs, giving her the Ukraine account. Nuland is also married to neocon theorist Robert Kagan, whose Project for the New American Century pushed for the invasion of Iraq as early as 1998. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Obama’s True Foreign Policy ‘Weakness.’”]

By December 2013, Nuland was so confident of her control over U.S. policy toward Ukraine that she publicly reminded Ukrainian business leaders that, to help Ukraine achieve “its European aspirations, we have invested more than $5 billion.” She even waded into the Maidan protests to pass out cookies and urge the demonstrators on.

In keeping her in the State Department and promoting her, Obama and his two secretaries of state Hillary Clinton and John Kerry created a human bridge to the neocons’ dark-side years. Nuland also seems to have infected impressionable Obama administration officials with the kind approach to reality attributed by author Ron Suskind to one senior Bush administration official: “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.”

This may be the nostrum used by Nuland and Kerry to whom Obama has mostly deferred to run U.S. policy vis-à-vis Russia. Ambassador Matlock will find it small solace, but it may help him understand what seems to be going on in policy toward Ukraine.

Writing early last year on the burgeoning crisis there, Matlock said: “I cannot understand how he [Obama] could fail to recognize that confronting President Putin publicly on an issue that is so central to Russian national pride and honor, not only tends to have the opposite effect on the issue at hand, but actually strengthens tendencies in Russia that we should wish to discourage. It is as if he, along with his advisers, is living in some alternate ideological and psychological universe.”

Putin: Little Tolerance for Other Reality

Before finishing with a few recommendations, let’s apply the proven tools of media analysis to see if we can discern how Russian President Putin is reacting to all this. (Hint: He is not going to yield to pressure on the issue of Ukraine.)

At a press conference ten days after the coup in Kiev, Putin complained about “our Western partners” continuing to interfere in Ukraine. “I sometimes get the feeling,” he said, “that somewhere across that huge puddle, in America, people sit in a lab and conduct experiments, as if with rats, without actually understanding the consequences of what they are doing. Why do they need to do this?”

And in a speech two weeks later, Putin said:

“Our colleagues in the West … have lied to us many times, made decisions behind our backs, placed before us an accomplished fact. This happened with NATO’s expansion to the east, as well as the deployment of military infrastructure at our borders. … It happened with the deployment of a missile defense system. …

“They are constantly trying to sweep us into a corner. … But there is a limit to everything. And with Ukraine, our Western partners have crossed the line. … If you compress the spring all the way to its limit, it will snap back hard. … Today, it is imperative to end this hysteria and refute the rhetoric of the cold war. … Russia has its own national interests that need to be taken into account and respected.”

On Sept. 8, 2013, when Secretary Kerry swore Nuland in as Assistant Secretary of State, he gushed over “Toria’s” accomplishments, with a panegyric fully deserving of the adjective fulsome. It was a huge hint that Kerry would give her free rein in crafting policy toward Russia, Ukraine, et al.

Fortunately, Nuland was not able to sabotage the behind-the-scenes dialogue between Obama and Putin that enabled Putin to dissuade Obama from attacking Syria in September 2013 by convincing him the Syrians were about to agree to destroy all their chemical weapons. Obama had cut Kerry out of those sensitive talks, but left on his own Kerry continued to try to drum up international support for military action against Syria.

That Kerry was blindsided by the extraordinary agreement worked out by Obama and Putin with Syria, became embarrassingly obvious when Kerry, at a press conference in London on Sept. 9, 2013, dismissed any likelihood that Syria would ever agree to let its chemical arsenal be destroyed. Later that same day the agreement to destroy Syria’s chemical weapons was announced.

Sadly, to some significant degree, the U.S. mischief in Ukraine can be regarded as payback from Kerry, his Senate buddy John McCain, and of course Nuland for Russia’s dashing their hopes for a major U.S. military bombing campaign against the Syrian government.

Putin: Kerry “Knows He Is Lying”

It is rare that a head of state will call the head diplomat of a rival state a “liar.” But that’s what Putin did six days after Obama overruled Kerry and stopped the attack on Syria. On Sept. 5, 2013, as Obama arrived in St. Petersburg for the G-20 summit, Putin referred openly to Kerry’s congressional testimony on Syria a few days earlier in which Kerry greatly exaggerated the strength of the “moderate” rebels in Syria.

Kerry had also repeated highly dubious claim (made 35 times at an Aug. 30 State Department press conference) that the Assad government was behind the chemical attacks near Damascus on Aug. 21, that he had thus had crossed the “red line” Obama had set, and that Syria needed to be admonished by military attack.

About Kerry, Putin took the gloves off: “This was very unpleasant and surprising for me. We talk to them [the Americans], and we assume they are decent people, but he is lying and he knows that he is lying. This is sad.”

Putin’s stern words about Kerry and the behind-the-scenes Obama-Putin collaboration that defused the Syrian crisis of 2013 appear to have awakened the neocons to the need to shatter that cooperation – and the Ukraine coup became the perfect device to do so.

New Year’s Resolutions

Five things for Obama to do for a fresh start to the New Year:

1 – Fire Kerry and Nuland.

2 – Read the New York Times op-ed by Putin on Sept. 11, 2013, just after cooperation with Obama had yielded the extraordinary result of the destruction of Syria’s chemical weapons.

3 – Stop the foolish talk about the U.S. being “the one indispensable nation.” (The President said this so many times last year that some suspect he is beginning to believe his own rhetoric. This is how Putin chose to address this feel-good, but noxious, triumphalism in ending his op-ed:

“It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation. There are big countries and small countries, rich and poor, those with long democratic traditions and those still finding their way to democracy. Their policies differ, too. We are all different, but when we ask for the Lord’s blessings, we must not forget that God created us equal.”

4 – Lean on the Quislings in Kiev to stop their foolishness. One golden opportunity to do that would be to participate in the international summit called for by Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko on Jan. 15 in Kazakhstan, where Putin and the leaders of Germany and France are also expected to take part.

5 – Finally, pick a different ending this year for your speeches. How about: “God bless the United States of America and the rest of the world, too.”

Ray McGovern now works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. During his 27 years as a CIA analyst, he served as chief of the Soviet Foreign Policy Branch, chair of several National Intelligence Estimates, and preparer and White House briefer of the President’s Daily Brief. He now serves on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

New York Times: Still no coup in Ukrane - blind or binded? by R. Parry



NYT Still Pretends No Coup in Ukraine

January 6, 2015

Exclusive: The New York Times keeps insisting that last year’s Ukrainian coup wasn’t a coup and anyone who thinks so lives inside “the Russian propaganda bubble.” But a slanted Times “investigation” shows that the newspaper remains lost inside the U.S. government’s “propaganda bubble,” writes Robert Parry.

By Robert Parry


During my years at Newsweek in the late 1980s, when I would propose correcting some misguided conventional wisdom, I’d often be told, “let’s leave that one for the historians,” with the magazine not wanting to challenge an erroneous storyline that all the important people “knew” to be true. And if false narratives only affected the past, one might argue my editors had a point. There’s always a lot of current news to cover.


But most false narratives are not really about the past; they are about how the public perceives the present and addresses the future. And it should fall to journalists to do their best to explain this background information even if it embarrasses powerful people and institutions, including the news organizations themselves.





The neo-Nazi Wolfsangel symbol on a banner in Ukraine.


Yet, rather than take on that difficult task, most major news outlets prefer to embroider onto their existing tapestry of misinformation, fitting today’s reporting onto the misshapen fabric of yesterday’s. They rarely start from scratch and admit the earlier work was wrong.


So, how does the mainstream U.S. news media explain the Ukraine crisis after essentially falsifying the historical record for the past year? Well, if you’re the New York Times, you keep on spinning the old storyline, albeit with a few adjustments.


For instance, on Sunday, the Times published a lengthy article that sought to sustain the West’s insistence that the coup overthrowing elected President Viktor Yanukovych wasn’t really a coup – just the crumbling of his government in the face of paramilitary violence from the street with rumors of worse violence to come – though that may sound to you pretty much like a coup. Still, the Times does make some modifications to Yanukovych’s image.


In the article, Yanukovych is recast from a brutal autocrat willfully having his police slaughter peaceful protesters into a frightened loser whose hand was “shaking” as he signed a Feb. 21 agreement with European diplomats, agreeing to reduce his powers and hold early elections, a deal that was cast aside on Feb. 22 when armed neo-Nazi militias overran presidential and parliamentary offices.


Defining a Coup



One might wonder what the New York Times thinks a coup looks like. Indeed, the Ukrainian coup had many of the same earmarks as such classics as the CIA-engineered regime changes in Iran in 1953 and in Guatemala in 1954.


The way those coups played out is now historically well known. Secret U.S. government operatives planted nasty propaganda about the target leader, stirred up political and economic chaos, conspired with rival political leaders, spread rumors of worse violence to come and then – as political institutions collapsed – chased away the duly elected leader before welcoming the new “legitimate” order.


In Iran, that meant reinstalling the autocratic Shah who then ruled with a heavy hand for the next quarter century; in Guatemala, the coup led to more than three decades of brutal military regimes and the killing of some 200,000 Guatemalans.


Coups don’t have to involve army tanks occupying the public squares, although that is an alternative model which follows many of the same initial steps except that the military is brought in at the end. The military coup was a common approach especially in Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s.


But the preferred method in more recent years has been the “color revolution,” which operates behind the façade of a “peaceful” popular uprising and international pressure on the targeted leader to show restraint until it’s too late to stop the coup. Despite the restraint, the leader is still accused of gross human rights violations, all the better to justify his removal.


Later, the ousted leader may get an image makeover; instead of a cruel bully, he is ridiculed for not showing sufficient resolve and letting his base of support melt away, as happened with Mohammad Mossadegh in Iran and Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala.

The Ukraine Reality



The reality of what happened in Ukraine was never hard to figure out. George Friedman, the founder of the global intelligence firm Stratfor, called the overthrow of Yanukovych “the most blatant coup in history.” It’s just that the major U.S. news organizations were either complicit in the events or incompetent in describing them to the American people.


The first step in this process was to obscure that the motive for the coup – pulling Ukraine out of Russia’s economic orbit and capturing it in the European Union’s gravity field – was actually announced by influential American neocons in 2013.


On Sept. 26, 2013, National Endowment for Democracy President Carl Gershman, who has become a major neocon paymaster, took to the op-ed page of the neocon Washington Post and called Ukraine “the biggest prize” and an important interim step toward toppling Russian President Vladimir Putin.


At the time, Gershman, whose NED is funded by the U.S. Congress to the tune of about $100 million a year, was financing scores of projects inside Ukraine – training activists, paying for journalists and organizing business groups.


As for that even bigger prize – Putin – Gershman wrote: “Ukraine’s choice to join Europe will accelerate the demise of the ideology of Russian imperialism that Putin represents. … Russians, too, face a choice, and Putin may find himself on the losing end not just in the near abroad but within Russia itself.”


At that time, in early fall 2013, Ukraine’s President Yanukovych was exploring the idea of reaching out to Europe with an association agreement. But he got cold feet in November 2013 when economic experts in Kiev advised him that the Ukrainian economy would suffer a $160 billion hit if it separated from Russia, its eastern neighbor and major trading partner. There was also the West’s demand that Ukraine accept a harsh austerity plan from the International Monetary Fund.


Yanukovych wanted more time for the EU negotiations, but his decision angered many western Ukrainians who saw their future more attached to Europe than Russia. Tens of thousands of protesters began camping out at Maidan Square in Kiev, with Yanukovych ordering the police to show restraint.


Meanwhile, with Yanukovych shifting back toward Russia, which was offering a more generous $15 billion loan and discounted natural gas, he soon became the target of American neocons and the U.S. media, which portrayed Ukraine’s political unrest as a black-and-white case of a brutal and corrupt Yanukovych opposed by a saintly “pro-democracy” movement.


The Maidan uprising was urged on by American neocons, including Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland, who passed out cookies at the Maidan and told Ukrainian business leaders that the United States had invested $5 billion in their “European aspirations.”


In the weeks before the coup, according to an intercepted phone call, Nuland discussed with U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt who should lead the future regime. Nuland said her choice was Arseniy Yatsenyuk. “Yats is the guy,” she told Pyatt as he pondered how to “midwife this thing.”


Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, also showed up, standing on stage with right-wing extremists from the Svoboda Party and telling the crowd that the United States was with them in their challenge to the Ukrainian government.


As the winter progressed, the protests grew more violent. Neo-Nazi and other extremist elements from Lviv and western Ukrainian cities began arriving in well-organized brigades or “sotins” of 100 trained street fighters. Police were attacked with firebombs and other weapons as the violent protesters began seizing government buildings and unfurling Nazi banners and even a Confederate flag.


Though Yanukovych continued to order his police to show restraint, he was still depicted in the major U.S. news media as a brutal thug who was callously murdering his own people. The chaos reached a climax on Feb. 20 when mysterious snipers opened fire on police and some protesters, killing scores. As police retreated, the militants advanced brandishing firearms and other weapons. The confrontation led to significant loss of life, pushing the death toll to around 80 including more than a dozen police.


U.S. diplomats and the mainstream U.S. press immediately blamed Yanukovych for the sniper attack, though the circumstances remain murky to this day and some investigations have suggested that the lethal sniper fire came from buildings controlled by Right Sektor extremists.


To tamp down the worsening violence, a shaken Yanukovych signed a European-brokered deal on Feb. 21, in which he accepted reduced powers and an early election so he could be voted out of office. He also agreed to requests from Vice President Joe Biden to pull back the police.


The precipitous police withdrawal then opened the path for the neo-Nazis and other street fighters to seize presidential offices and force Yanukovych’s people to flee for their lives. Yanukovych traveled to eastern Ukraine and the new coup regime that took power – and was immediately declared “legitimate” by the U.S. State Department – sought Yanukovych’s arrest for murder. Nuland’s favorite, Yatsenyuk, became the new prime minister.

Media Bias



Throughout the crisis, the mainstream U.S. press hammered home the theme of white-hatted protesters versus a black-hatted president. The police were portrayed as brutal killers who fired on unarmed supporters of “democracy.” The good-guy/bad-guy narrative was all the American people heard from the major media.


The New York Times went so far as to delete the slain policemen from the narrative and simply report that the police had killed all those who died in the Maidan. A typical Times report on March 5, 2014, summed up the storyline: “More than 80 protesters were shot to death by the police as an uprising spiraled out of control in mid-February.”


The mainstream U.S. media also sought to discredit anyone who observed the obvious fact that an unconstitutional coup had just occurred. A new theme emerged that portrayed Yanukovych as simply deciding to abandon his government because of the moral pressure from the noble and peaceful Maidan protests.


Any reference to a “coup” was dismissed as “Russian propaganda.” There was a parallel determination in the U.S. media to discredit or ignore evidence that neo-Nazi militias had played an important role in ousting Yanukovych and in the subsequent suppression of anti-coup resistance in eastern and southern Ukraine. That opposition among ethnic-Russian Ukrainians simply became “Russian aggression.”


This refusal to notice what was actually a remarkable story – the willful unleashing of Nazi storm troopers on a European population for the first time since World War II – reached absurd levels as the New York Times and the Washington Post buried references to the neo-Nazis at the end of stories, almost as afterthoughts.

The Washington Post went to the extreme of rationalizing Swastikas and other Nazi symbols by quoting one militia commander as calling them “romantic” gestures by impressionable young men. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Ukraine’s ‘Romantic’ Neo-Nazi Storm Troopers.”]


Yet, despite the best efforts of the Times, the Post and other mainstream outlets to conceal this ugly reality from the American people, alternative news sources – presenting a more realistic account of what was happening in Ukraine – began to chip away at the preferred narrative.


Instead of buying the big media’s storyline, many Americans were coming to realize that the reality was much more complicated and that they were again being sold a bill of propaganda goods.

Denying a Coup



To the rescue rode the New York Times on Sunday, presenting what was portrayed as a detailed, granular “investigation” of how there was no coup in Ukraine and reaffirming the insistence that only Moscow stooges would think such a thing.


“Russia has attributed Mr. Yanukovych’s ouster to what it portrays as a violent, ‘neo-fascist’ coup supported and even choreographed by the West and dressed up as a popular uprising,” wroteAndrew Higgins and Andrew E. Kramer. “Few outside the Russian propaganda bubble ever seriously entertained the Kremlin’s line. But almost a year after the fall of Mr. Yanukovych’s government, questions remain about how and why it collapsed so quickly and completely.”


The Times’ article concluded that Yanukovych “was not so much overthrown as cast adrift by his own allies, and that Western officials were just as surprised by the meltdown as anyone else. The allies’ desertion, fueled in large part by fear, was accelerated by the seizing by protesters of a large stock of weapons in the west of the country. But just as important, the review of the final hours shows, was the panic in government ranks created by Mr. Yanukovych’s own efforts to make peace.”


Yet, what is particularly curious about this article is that it ignores the substantial body of evidence that the U.S. officials were instrumental in priming the crisis and fueling the ultimate ouster of Yanukovych. For instance, the Times makes no reference to the multitude of U.S.-financed political projects in Ukraine including scores by Gershman’s NED, nor the extraordinary intervention by Assistant Secretary of State Nuland.


Nuland’s encouragement to those challenging the elected government of Ukraine would surely merit mentioning, one would think. But it disappears from the Times’ version of history. Perhaps even more amazing there is no reference to the Nuland-Pyatt phone call, though Pyatt was interviewed for the article.


Even if the Times wanted to make excuses for the Nuland-Pyatt scheming – claiming perhaps it didn’t prove that they were coup-plotting – you would think the infamous phone call would deserve at least a mention. But Nuland isn’t referenced anywhere. Nor is Gershman. Nor is McCain.


The most useful part of the Times’ article is its description of the impact from a raid by anti-Yanukovych militias in the western city of Lviv on a military arsenal and the belief that the guns were headed to Kiev to give the uprising greater firepower.


The Times reports that “European envoys met at the German Embassy with Andriy Parubiy, the chief of the protesters’ security forces, and told him to keep the Lviv guns away from Kiev. ‘We told him: “Don’t let these guns come to Kiev. If they come, that will change the whole situation,”’ Mr. Pyatt recalled telling Mr. Parubiy, who turned up for the meeting wearing a black balaclava.


“In a recent interview in Kiev, Mr. Parubiy denied that the guns taken in Lviv ever got to Kiev, but added that the prospect that they might have provided a powerful lever to pressure both Mr. Yanukovych’s camp and Western governments. ‘I warned them that if Western governments did not take firmer action against Yanukovych, the whole process could gain a very threatening dimension,’ he said.


“Andriy Tereschenko, a Berkut [police] commander from Donetsk who was holed up with his men in the Cabinet Ministry, the government headquarters in Kiev, said that 16 of his men had already been shot on Feb. 18 and that he was terrified by the rumors of an armory of automatic weapons on its way from Lviv. ‘It was already an armed uprising, and it was going to get worse,’ he said. ‘We understood why the weapons were taken, to bring them to Kiev.’”


The Times leaves out a fuller identification of Parubiy. Beyond serving as the chief of the Maidan “self-defense forces,” Parubiy was a notorious neo-Nazi, the founder of the Social-National Party of Ukraine (and the national security chief for the post-coup regime). But “seeing no neo-Nazis” in Ukraine had become a pattern for the New York Times.


Still, the journalistic question remains: what does the New York Times think a coup looks like? You have foreign money, including from the U.S. government, pouring into Ukraine to finance political and propaganda operations. You have open encouragement to the coup-makers from senior American officials.

You have hundreds of trained and armed paramilitary fighters dispatched to Kiev from Lviv and other western cities. You have the seizure of an arsenal amid rumors that these more powerful weapons are being distributed to these paramilitaries. You have international pressure on the elected president to pull back his security forces, even as Western propaganda portrays him as a mass murderer.

Anyone who knows about the 1954 Guatemala coup would remember that a major element of that CIA operation was a disinformation campaign, broadcast over CIA-financed radio stations, about a sizeable anti-government force marching on Guatemala City, thus spooking the Arbenz government to collapse and Arbenz to flee.

But the Times article is not a serious attempt to study the Ukraine coup. If it had been, it would have looked seriously at the substantial evidence of Western interference and into other key facts, such as the identity of the Feb. 20 snipers. Instead, the article was just the latest attempt to pretend that the coup really wasn’t a coup.

Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s.